ex nihilo nihil fit
by squithykitten
Summary: After Spike's "death" and Julia's disappearance, Vicious only sees one way to go: up. Told partially from the perspective of an OC who experiences a rapidly and brutally diminishing quality of life. See inside for the gory details on that, but my intent is to stick to what we know of canon as well as I can. Warning: explicit violence, drugs, adult situation. People don't play nice.
1. Chapter 1

So, yes. OC. OC drops in on another dimension from the "real world." This is that kind of dumbass fic. Well, partially anyway. Always wanted to write one, maybe one that gave a shot at not being too stupid. That being said...

 **WARNING:** There will be NO: OC/established character romance, "fixing" anybody, or any meaning or purpose to any of this. What does that mean? The Powers That Be did not deposit said OC into this universe for any discernible reason, except for the fact that I think it's hilarious to torture my original characters. Which is shitty, but life is shitty and unfair so there you go. This is not a cute adventure story about having fun while preoccupied with trite high school crushes. It's a story about someone trying to quite literally survive in a hostile environment. There are drugs, alcohol, violence, death, and abuse, sexual and physical (although because America is creepily prudish about sex while totally okay with evisceration, we will go with implied for the former and explicit for the latter). Cheerful little bits of happiness are stolen where you can get them.

But also, and more to the point, this is about Vicious and his issues and how the hell he climbed that ladder, because why the fuck not and there's not nearly enough about him. Ps, no, the OC is not going to hook up with him or ever really be on good terms with the man. Hahahahaaaa...no. You're funny.

Vicious is an acrimonious bastard who eventually pulls off a coup, so that's what we're going to go with.

Also, there will be a fair minimum of interaction with the main characters of the show on the part of the OC. If ever. Because that just doesn't fit the character arc. Vicious will, and so will Lin and whoever actually existed in the main show, but then this fic is primarily concerned with the times and places that are off screen.

Disclaimer: I don't own shit.

This story starts out kind of wordy, but it gets into actual action pretty quick. Also, swearing. If you can't handle it, get out.

* * *

Pale pink fingers of light reached across the Martian plain, stretching towards the rim of the crater city. The view shimmered as the enormous weather-regulating machines churned out the planned atmospheric conditions of the day, spilling mist all the long way down to the planet's bare floor at the base of the crater wall. People here took it for granted that the weather report could be relied upon; Denali had laughed at her when she suggested that he should bring an umbrella when it was an overcast and moody gray, because when the weatherman said it was overcast but not going to rain, it would be overcast but not rain.

Outside the cities the sky was a burnished bronze, and to Elena that would always be beautiful and novel. She made a point of coming up here at least once a week to watch the sun rise, the city behind her forgotten if only for a few sweet minutes.

She shivered as a poof of cold air washed over her head, and she hugged herself tightly. Terraformed Mars hovered at around 60-ish Fahrenheit— _no_. Eventually she would get used to Celsius (and the metric system), which was what was used here. Mars hovered at 15 degrees Celsius, give or take a few, but in any case it was on that edge between chilly and cool. The burning end of her cigarette was a poor source of warmth, but aside from the long, gauzy red scarf wrapped several times around her throat it was all she had.

Once, she had found an excuse to be here during the early afternoon, and she sat at her perch watching the ships make their final approaches to the spaceport through forests of holographic billboards, sometimes skimming so low over the rim of the city that she was afraid they would hit it. The engine burn was deafening, louder even than jet engines, and the roar made the maintenance scaffolding tremble; she had to cover her ears and bend down low to keep from going deaf and getting blown over the side to her death. From the angle she viewed them, they first looked to be diving like Stuka pilots before careening in a parabola at the last second, ultimately destined to roost into their ivory and tarmac nests in the south end of town.

The sun was fully above the horizon line now, and she turned around to view the whole of Tharsis, still shaded in its cradle except for the topmost, shimmering spires of the eastern business district. The first settlements on Mars had used craters as convenient bowls to hold biospheres, and humanity hadn't quite spilled over their rims, yet, but maybe that was a good thing for the moment: technology hadn't advanced far enough yet for total terraformation and outside of the scattered poleis the land was still arid and largely inhospitable.

"There's no place like home," she whispered, and just in case it worked this time, she tapped her heels together. But she wasn't wearing silver or Technicolor scarlet; she wore the plain flats she 'arrived' wearing. Nothing happened.

A wave of disappointment rose up and engulfed her, and she put a hand on the railing to steady herself.

"I am Elena Reynolds," she murmured, a kind of mantra. "And this is not my universe. I won't forget that, because I have to stay conscious enough of it to try and find a way..." Her voice faltered, "Home." _Somehow_. She had no notion of how she had come here in the first place, though, and less idea where to start looking to find a way back, so her outlook was decidedly bleak.

From the very first night it was impossible to extract herself from the reality of her situation: _she was here_ , and she still needed to eat, sleep, and do all the things that kept her physically alive and in good repair. It was not an adventure. There was no whimsical traipsing and exciting, dramatic conflicts forthcoming, no greater purpose. Here, she felt the wind and the rain, and smelled the smells. She got earaches, and sneezed when her nose tickled, and got chapped lips in dry wind.

Her existence here was exactly as miserable, invisible, and meaningless as it was on Earth—even more so, since on Earth she had had a place to be and people who really cared about her. The only things she recognized from it, she had come to realize, were of an almost purely superficial nature, specific to individuals whereas she stood alone in a multitude.

It was strange how easily she had become enmeshed in this world, and then how back-breakingly _normal_ it was; almost like being abroad, but with more and different technology, customs, and people. She was beginning to recognize names and places, had her favorite foods and things, and it mattered less and less every day that she must have been sometime around whenever Spike and Vicious fell out and Spike left the Red Dragon syndicate.

If it had happened, was happening, would happen, it hadn't affected her. People talked about the syndicates, but not about two men and a woman and their personal problems, even ones as seminal as these seemed.

People talked about money.

It didn't mean roses and gunfire and cool poses. 'The syndicates' encompassed all kinds of people, with one overriding aim: survival.

To that end, she saw little difference between them and her. Here, as much as anywhere, the syndicates were a living social organization, a vast network of interconnected businesses and interests, feeding into a great, overhanging storm cloud, one which warred with other storm clouds. It was always there, behind a closed door. Its eyes were omnipresent and invisible, beneficent and tyrannical, and in its territory its power was omnipotent, a source of order and chaos.

It was so easy to forget that she was "supposed to know things"—maybe it was so easy because of the finite value of the things she knew? What was she going to do? Knock on the Red Dragons' HQ door, ask for Mao Yenrai, and tell him that she knew where he could find Spike? To hell with that—odds were, she would get herself killed even trying to figure out how to make that meeting happen. Mao might be convinced to talk to her, but why should she stick her foot in a hornet's nest if Vicious was there, too? What good would that do her? Would Mao feed her or feel any kind of gratitude? He didn't know her, and the man, as sweet as he appeared on the show and defunct as Vicious thought him, still commanded a good deal of hushed respect on the streets. Mao had earned his place in fire and blood. He didn't give a shit about her. He sure as hell wasn't likely to treat her nicely for her trouble; worst case scenario, he had her killed to protect Spike.

And, here was the other side of that coin: if she flubbed it—which she was all but guaranteed to do—and the wrong people found out, even if Mao would have thanked her gratefully and set her up for life and Vicious didn't do anything, Spike had still run from an organization that consisted of more than just the ones she knew of. It was an organization _you did not leave except in a body bag_. Somehow, at the end of the show, if Spike had lived, the assumption was that he would have taken command of the syndicate like some kind of Necromonger. But that was a singular situation.

Spike would be targeted if she dimed him out for personal gain, and she had no reason to draw that down on him.

This was not Tharsis, a city in _Cowboy Bebop_ , where things happened through the lens of cinematography and those well established and on the inside.

This was Tharsis, the city on Mars where she lived in the closet of a crappy, falling down apart tenement building, peddling coke for an ambitious and clever high school drop out. Where she saw tiny shrines to the Buddha in the windows of many restaurant and businesses. Where there was a kebab shop around the corner run by a really sweet old couple who used to give her scraps at the end of the night before Denali took her in, and later invited her to their Eid feast. Where there was a city park with ducks in a pond, and a latent, damp coolness in the morning that was something like the western coast of California which was dangerous after dark, something she found out personally...but the buildings all looked old before their time, having been built up fast to hold refugees from a wrecked Earth, then emptied as the diaspora after the Gate Accident flooded to the Julian moons, and left without maintenance.

All of these things—this was Tharsis. And she was one infinitesimal, alien part of it. Up here, she stood above, but down there..

Elena shut her eyes briefly and leaned her head backwards, pulling back the last of her cigarette. It was only up here that she let herself think about these things much anymore, kept this lofty perspective; in the city basin, she was just one more human, and it didn't matter if she had been born in this universe or another. She still shit, ate, slept. Nothing marked her as remarkable, and she was so commonplace that sometimes she wondered if she only tried hard enough, pulled herself out of anonymity, then she could find somebody who might be able to help her.

Meanwhile, Denali seemed to like her; she had started to make deliveries for him in the nicer parts of the cities to places he couldn't go easily because he looked like the two-bit bottom-feeding street-level gangbanger he was. Even if he wasn't officially on the inside yet of whichever syndicate it was he was hanging around (it was in the works), he still looked like a punk troublemaker and he couldn't talk pretty. That's what he had her for. Since she had started working for him, his distribution north of the canal had quintupled, and so had profits.

And people said knowing the difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork never did anybody any good.

Elena opened her eyes and rolled over so that she faced the horizon again, but looked down. From this high place the fog was almost opaque as it hit the ground. She dropped the cigarette, and watched the ember fall and disappear into obscurity, into a great vastness in which it was nothing.

She snorted. _Poetic_.

"You can't do that."

Elena lifted her head and turned to the left, towards Donnie. He wore a fluorescent yellow safety vest over his blue coveralls. She wore a safety vest too, over her regular clothes.

"You're not supposed to trash the base."

Elena shrugged and straightened up. "Same time next week?"

He nodded. "Drop the vest off at the front office, okay?"

"Did they get those little muffins today? I like the blueberry ones."

"You are such a scavenger."

"I have a lot of ground to cover and I need the calories," she replied. "Either way, Maria's guaranteed to have coffee."

"Right. See you next week."

Elena didn't say goodbye as she climbed down the latter and descended from the catwalk. She never really knew how to end a conversation, and would linger awkwardly trying to find the right moment to leave. Donnie didn't seem to mind her abrupt exits and she didn't care what he thought about her as long as their business relationship worked out, which of course was fruitful.

She stopped by the office to drop off the vest and chatted with the office girls long enough to make off with coffee and three cinnamon walnut mini muffins wrapped in a napkin. From there she made her way back to the skytrain station. She ate her muffins while waiting twenty minutes until the train arrived. It carried day workers who got off at the perimeter maintenance station and rank-and-file white collar salarymen who worked uptown, where she was headed.

Elena tucked herself neatly into a small space between a nervous looking man with no chin and another, very tall man who was muttering frantically (into an earpiece?) in Russian. The couple sitting down in the seats were chatting amiably in something that didn't sound Vietnamese and didn't sound Turkish, so who knew what that was.

The skytrain jolted unexpectedly. They all lurched, caught off guard, and the tall Russian stumbled into her. He caught himself and turned around, looking down into her face.

" _Izvinite_."

" _Gesundheit_ ," Elena quipped.

He only stared at her. "It means excuse me." He had a glass-cut RP British accent. She was taken aback to hear it.

"Uh...sorry," she managed, and looked at her feet in embarrassment.

By now the sky even down here was noticeably lighter. Inside the crater the sky was blue in the day, like it was on Earth. After a while you forgot about the walls rising all around on a conscious level, but they were ever present in the background. It was only on the rim that she remembered where she was, who she was, and what she was: an outsider. It was a perspective she could not afford to forget, and so she returned to it often.

"There's no place like home," she whispered, so quietly that it wasn't much more than a breath, her mouth moving around the words. She tapped her heels. And nothing happened.

 _I wish it were that easy_.

She rode the train to Walleye Station and all of them got off, leaving just a few behind as they streamed out onto the platform. The uptown district was made up of glass-walled skyscrapers and city streets that seemed permanently choked with traffic, even in the wee hours of the morning. Since everyone who was anyone had a car, they made sure they drove it to work. The sidewalks were moving tides of people, and Elena kept her hands in her pockets, hands around the things she didn't want to lose. The money and the drugs were safely stashed inside inner pockets that couldn't be picked, but anything in an outer pocket that wasn't nailed down had the tendency to disappear.

Elena was looking up at a third-floor restaurant that had just opened, with its advertisements flashing on the windows, when her knee crashed into something that let out a startled, shrill grunt. She stumbled, but caught herself before she fell. Something small and shadowlike darted away into a nearby alley.

 _Little asshole_ , she thought uncharitably, and kept moving. No one else had even glanced at the urchin, though that probably just meant someone hadn't noticed their wallet was missing, yet. She checked...yep, everything of hers was still there.

She kept walking until she made it to her destination.

The Chrysler Building—no relation to the New York City landmark, except in the name, because it didn't look anything like New York's Chrysler Building—was one of the larger skyscrapers in Walleye, a big steel brute that added a fourth more height to itself with the inclusion of an enormous antenna fixed to the top. It was one of the skyscrapers she had looked at from the rim, though that early in the day she had still seen the flashing red light at the top that warned air and spacecraft that it was there.

She walked up to it and through the doors, into a climate-controlled, marble-floored lobby with real potted plants next to chintz couches. Cindy looked up and smiled at her from behind the reception desk.

"You're back!" she exclaimed cheerfully. "Go right on up. He's expecting you."

Elena breezed past her towards the elevators, joining a throng of sleepy-eyed worker bees gravitating to their places in this great big honeycomb. Slowly, she became aware of someone hissing her name above everyone's head. She looked up and around, and saw a hand waving over the throng.

"Julie!" Elena managed to slide through the press and sidled up to a round woman in a gray business casual pantsuit. It had happened almost by accident; one moment Elena was only as friendly to her as she was to anyone here, and the next Julie was inviting her out for drinks with girlfriends. Elena always declined, but wasn't sure how to deescalate the situation harmlessly. "Are those donuts?"

"It's Friday," Julie said by way of explanation. "I haven't seen you in a while. How have you been?"

Most people here were as polite to her as they were to any other coworker, though many of them didn't pay her enough mind to wonder what she did. She waltzed in and waltzed out looking like she had a purpose, and most people accepted that at face value.

"I'm alright. How are you? How was Christine's recital?"

And Julie was off. It was easy to sidetrack the woman by showing any interest in her children. Elena was decidedly not interested in kids as a rule, but she nodded and smiled as if she were. As they finally filed onto an elevator and the doors shut, Elena tried to vainly ignore the foot that was still firmly planted on a moral compass. It was a dangerous thing, currying any kind of friendly relations with someone up here whom she was not selling to.

"But, you know, she's only eleven and she's such a whiz on the oboe! Her tutor says that she might be ready for circular breathing."

"I do not know what that is," Elena admitted, rousing herself to listen in earnest.

"It's when you breathe in through the nose while still playing a note on the instrument."

"Sounds hard."

"Oh, it is!" Julie gushed. "But she'll do _wonderfully_."

"Are you trying to get her into music school?"

"Oh, no, we want her to go to medical school. She's going to be a neuroprosthetician."

Elena wondered what little Christine thought of her parent's grand plans, or if she had been taught to have an opinion that wasn't fed to her. Then she thought of the forgotten, ragged little thief she had almost tripped over. _I wonder if they even know what an oboe is_.

"So why make her learn the oboe and not the periodic table?"

"Medical school requires a well-rounded resume," Julie said as if Elena should have known that. "Especially if she wants to get into John Collins University."

The name meant nothing to Elena, but she figured it must have been a pretty big deal to go there, wherever it was.

Julie got off on the twenty-seventh floor, while Elena continued all the way to the seventy-fifth. She hated heights and was legitimately fearful every time she made this delivery; the gentle sway of the structure in high winds was enough to make her sick, and as she stepped off the elevator, she felt the building roll under her feet, and she flinched, heart in her throat.

The 75th floor was the headquarters of a shipping conglomerate that had its fingers in everything, including a slew of lucrative government contracts. The office was decked out in shades of ivory trimmed in silver, and everywhere it exuded cool reserve. The lady seated behind the desk looked up. Elena did not recognize her.

"Good morning, how many I help you?" she asked.

"Hello; I have an appointment with Lem Magnusson."

"And you are...?"

"Elena Reynolds," she replied steadily, offering a reserved smile. This arrangement depended on Elena being polite but not pushy. "It's supposed to be at zero-nine today?"

"Elena Reynolds...here you are," the receptionist said as she ran her finger down a log book, instantly becoming a little brighter. "Please have a seat. Mr. Magnusson will be with you shortly; he's in the middle of a conference call."

Elena thanked her and sat down on a plush ivory leather sedan chair, and began to study a catalog that offered things that were too expensive to list the price. After a couple of minutes the receptionist stood up and offered her a drink while she waited. She brought Elena a full sized bottle of grapefruit flavored Perrier.

Elena stared at the full page ad that listed a vacation island on Ganymede, and briefly wondered how much it cost. _Dumb question. If you have to ask, you can't afford it_. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes or scoff; here, she dealt with the sort of people who thought of money in terms she didn't understand. The first rule was, don't mention money because it's rude to talk of baser things. _Of course_ there would be a catalog with vacation islands on other planets listed without a price. _Of course_ it would advertise children's playhouses that looked as big as barns and were built to look like a full-sized real leather teepee, a Chinese courtyard house, a Russian dacha.

 _Of fucking course_ the guy who ran this place would have his drug dealer come to him to make the delivery in business casual attire and heels. Not that she was complaining, as it turned out she really liked grapefruit flavored Perrier. It helped with her nausea. _Hurk_.

Close to ten minutes passed before the receptionist looked up and told her that Mr. Magnusson would see her now, and Elena stood up and followed her to the office in the back corner that overlooked most of Tharsis. It was one of the better views in the city, but Elena wondered if Magnusson had ever seen the sun rise while clinging to a maintenance scaffold, freezing his ass off.

"There you are," Magnusson said, not rising from his desk as the receptionist let her in. "Thank you, Grace, that will be all for now." The receptionist shut the door as Magnusson pushed a button on his desk that shut the blinds of the glass walls of his office, cutting them off from the view of his employees. "I was almost sure you wouldn't be here today."

"Why not? I got here on time," she said. "You were in a conference call."

Magnusson waved his hand dismissively. "So, do you have it?"

"Of course I have it," she replied drolly. "Have you got the money?" He nodded, and set out three neat stacks of crisp wulongs. He patted them affectionately and pushed them across the mahogany at her ( _ma-hogany_ ). The only way she could have been more amused was if it were cocobolo ( _cocobolo_ ). Elena approached, pulling out the half a pound of white crystal shards jacketed in cling wrap and plastic baggies, and pushed it across the desk at him. "Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Magnusson."

"My daughter is having a birthday party this weekend and her mother wants me to be there," he remarked, looking a bit ill. "The theme is Y2K. I'll be making good use of this."

This unexpected tidbit rendered Elena momentarily speechless. Aside from the fact he had just admitted to an intent to use drugs at a child's birthday party, "Y...Y2K?"

"Yes...almost a hundred years ago, people thought the world was going to end on January 1st, 2000." He said it with considerable smug superiority.

"Uh," Elena stammered. "No, that's not it. They thought all the computers were going to shut off and we were going to get stuck in the Dark Ages again." It was beyond her how Y2K was a good theme for a child's birthday party. She remembered Y2K, she had been twelve or thirteen at the time. "Anyway, 2038 was the real year everything was supposed to go to to hell. I guess it...didn't happen."

Magnusson seemed as shocked as she was, and he studied her as if they had not just traded four hundred grand's worth of highly illegal substance for five hundred grand—there was a delivery fee, after all, and to him it was small change. She asked for it on a lark and he had shrugged and slapped it on there. Elena had barely managed to scrape her jaw off the floor.

"2038?" he managed at last.

"Yes, um...it was similar to the Y2K problem, but where the problem was the inability to encode 20 vs. 19...the 2038 problem is...er, was, the inability of the signed 32 bit integer systems to process anything later than however many seconds it'd been since January 1st, 1970."

"What the hell is someone like you doing selling drugs?" Magnusson said, frowning hard. "The one before, the one I used to deal with when I had to actually go down there to get the goods— _that_ idiotic little turd, I'd believe he couldn't do anything else, but not you..."

"It's...really not..."

"Why don't you go to school and get a real job? You're smart enough for it."

"But then who will supply half the decision makers of Walleye, and who is going to pay me better for so little effort?" she countered wearily, a fixed smile twisting her mouth. The skyscraper swayed again and Elena almost hit the deck. "I-I have to leave. Other deliveries to make. Please call me when you run out again."

"Have you ever done administrative work before?" Magnusson asked. "I could use a good personal assistant."

"And spend most of my time up here?" Elena blew a raspberry. "You'd be paying for therapy on top of whatever salary I'd be getting."

"You get used to it," Magnusson said with a chuckle. "One hundred and fifty thousand per month starting pay, plus vacations. And a holiday bonus. Think about it."

Elena felt very ill, but she tried her best to smile. Her head was buzzing. _Is this really happening?_

"I will," she said, in a nearly toneless voice that sounded weak even in her own ears. "Think about it."

"Have you ever been off world, before?"

"I was born on Earth."

Magnusson was transparently surprised. "Born on Earth? Really?"

"Haven't seen my family in a while," she said, capitalizing on her very real distress. The trick to lying was to tell as much truth as you could and be vague with everything else. "I...have nothing to go back to. I don't like talking about it..."

"Somebody took the time to educate you," he said, almost gently. "It would be a shame to let that go to waste. That little skidmark you work for—Denny, whatever his name is—"

"Denali."

"Him. You're wasted on him. Give it some thought, I look forward to hearing from you."

* * *

Oh, I'm sorry, does this seem cheerful so far to you? I'm screaming.

Warning for next chapter: Vicious shows up and wrecks shit. Aside from the complete moral fuckery, murder, gore, and compulsory drug use. Vicious is not someone you want randomly appearing in your life. It doesn't end well.

Vicious, in my estimation, is not A., insane, B., a rapist, C., going to use the grip of his sword to perform B. I've read that. That got weird. I'd imagine vag juice is hard to get out of snake skin. Instead he's rational, but subject to the same flaws as Spike, because he is Spike's darker image: selfish and completely unable to let go of something, and because of this Greek tragedy AF. Spike, for all he's cool, could be extremely prideful (yo, Andy), and self-centered (it's cool to watch him not give a fuck, but have you ever dealt with people like that? They're exhausting). Where the two differ is in the actual execution of those presentiments. Vicious is a difficult character to write; he's this alarming mix of bitter vindictiveness and calculation, but here's the thing: he likely could never have gained enough of a following to take over a syndicate if he didn't at least have the charisma or sneakiness to arrange or talk his way into support.

Elena, if you're curious (I bet you're not), was originally conceived of as a bit villain character in a DBZ fic, but was more a villain of circumstance with her own agenda. Since that kind of DBZ fic has been done oftener and better than I could ever manage and I liked her character in general, I hijacked her for use as an MC in an original story that I'm writing, hopefully to get published one day. This is a somewhat altered form of her...Because it would be an AU to put her in the "real world" ("our world") anyway. And now she's here.

Why is there a weird OC? Well, she's kind of there for context. Plus I really just can't resist torturing her for funsies.

Poleis, btw, is plural for polis.


	2. Chapter 2

WARNING: Drug use is not just implied in this chapter. It's explicit. Not just eye drop dialed up to 11. Like actual real world drug use. And so I feel like I have to say: don't fucking do drugs, kids. They're illegal, addictive. I mean, they are pretty much all criminals, so... **DO NOT** READ THIS AND THINK YAY DRUGS SOUND FUN. Fucking. Do not.

If your thoughts are "then why are you portraying her as not having a bad high" well, people do do drugs because they make them feel good. They're still not a good thing to do.

*break*

* * *

"Hello-o," Elena called out cheerfully, sliding her shoes off at the door with a grateful sigh ( _man_ did it feel good to get out of shoes at the end of the day) and walking down the short hallway into the living room. The apartment was a shithole, and that was being kind to it. Water stains and questionable smears, and trash everywhere. Denali was a bit of a hoarder and a lot of a junkie, even if he had given her a closet to live in, and it all smelled faintly of urine. "Denali? Ken? Maya? Anyone home? Hello-o-o—I stopped by the fancy grocery store off Elk Street on the way back, picked up some petit fours. You ever had those? They're these little mini cakes—"

She stopped and _stared_. A man she had never met before sat on the couch, gazing up at her with such animal hostility that she stood rooted to the spot like a deer in the headlights. And even though she had never met him, recognition was instant and electric.

White hair... _No_. Blue eyes... _NO_. How? Why? Her luck was not this fucking bad. Nothing she could have done in a past life could possibly have been bad enough for her to deserve this. _It can't be_... _of all the crazy fucks in this city...on this planet, in this_ universe _, of all the fucking universes, of all the syndicate creeps,_ why...

No gold piping, no bird, not even a sword, yet, but she could not be mistaken, not when he had that hair—he was looking right at her and the center of this man's attention was a very bad place to be.

"You're back," Denali said, startling her. His voice was grim. Elena looked over at him, standing in the awning between the living room and the kitchen with his arms crossed and an uncharacteristically serious look to him. Denali looked from her to the seated man, his face bloody and bruised, for all he was still on his feet. "Pay your respects. This is Vicious."

Elena said nothing for several seconds. She didn't trust herself to answer. Finally, when the silence kept going and it was obvious her active participation was demanded...

"Um—Hello...it's nice to meet you. Do you...uh, like...petit fours?" she finally asked, in a thin voice. That had sounded a lot less pathetic in her head. Denali just looked at her like she was an idiot. Vicious just stared at her.

"You might want to sit down," Denali said, and it wasn't a suggestion.

Elena obeyed, though she set the bag down at the entrance to the living room first. She took a seat on the couch, which was directly across from Vicious, who had yet to say a word, only continued to stare her down. Nor was he alone; there were three guys standing behind the chairs on his side, one behind the couch on hers, though none could match him for sheer venom.

Silence.

 _3, 2, 1_ —Elena took a breath and made damn sure to speak politely. "I'm—very sorry, I don't understand what's happening..."

"Take a hit," Vicious said, his voice low and quiet, and yet perfectly audible.

"Do what?" she exclaimed, horrified. She looked to Denali. "Take a hit? Of what?"

"The coke, stupid," Denali snapped, pointing at the coffee table between the chairs and the couch. Elena looked down at it. Amidst the general clutter was a little mirror tray, on which was a little pile of cocaine.

"Take a hit of the coke? But..."

Denali's eyes crackled. "Elena...shut your mouth and do what you're told."

"But I don't...I've never actually done..."

"Take the fucking hit," Denali hissed. "Idiot!"

"But _why?_ " On some level she was aware she was whining.

"Because he wants to be sure you're not ISSP," Denali hissed, glancing at Vicious with a fearful urgency.

"ISSP?" She frowned, the wheels of her mind spinning in mud. "Is—is it a big enough hit to kill me?" That happened sometimes...

"Is she always like this?" asked one of the men standing on Vicious' side of the room, in bored disbelief.

" _Elena_ ," Denali said, leaning forward. "Shut the fuck up and take the hit or he is definitely going to kill you. The coke only might kill you. Is that good enough?"

Elena blinked, frightened badly enough that she couldn't think of anything to say. _But I've not done anything! I'm not a cop! I just—I don't want to be here, I want to go home and pay taxes and rent like a_ normal _person!_ Still, she had the presence of mind to bend down. The only reason she even knew how to do this was that one scene in Breaking Bad and a lot of scenes in Scarface, and still, she was pretty sure she looked every inch as awkward and unlearned as she felt as she took the battered plastic credit card, long out of date, in hand and portioned off a strip.

She put her nostril above one end of what might have been flour (it wasn't) and pinched the other one down.

She inhaled sharply, moving forward to get all of the white powder, and though she flinched at the sensation of inhaling something into her nose—it stung like the Dickens—nothing happened for a couple of seconds, long enough that she wondered whether she had even done it right. In fact, was pretty sure she had fucked it up. _How hard do I have to fail at life to suck at doing cocaine_ —

It hit her like a slap to the face: a shot of adrenaline and seratonin both. She sat up, recoiling from the table in shock and alarm, a whimper eking out of her like a warbling, lame bird. _God damn, so this is why people do drugs_...she felt like she could do anything! All her worries were gone, which was empirically fucking _ridiculous,_ but...

Her heart slammed in her chest but her mind soared, as if all the world had sorted itself out. She felt forcibly _happy_ , a giddy rush of pleasure that knocked her off her socks and was stronger than anything she could remember feeling, a hundred times more potent. She was fidgeting, unable to stay still where before she was unable to move...

* * *

***...***

Denali watched Elena squirm on the couch and finally find that equilibrium where she could pay attention again, and when he looked at Vicious some of the fear in him had bled away. Hopefully that would be enough. When this fucking psycho bastard had showed up, Denali had been sure it was lights out for him, but...

"How's that?" he asked. "I told you, she doesn't do the drugs. She just sells them. She's kind of this weird, nerdy freak who hangs out here. Spends any money she gets on books."

Vicious studied her for several more seconds. "Then what do I need you for, if she can do all the work? Maybe she'll be more honest about how much she's making."

Denali's innards liquefied. _Shit_.

Elena shot up straight, her eyes huge and focused and looking Vicious right in the eye without a trace of fear. Cocaine made your brain fire on all cylinders, and he didn't doubt Elena was totally aware of what was going on. And she was always at her most dangerous when she was up and alert.

" _I_ need him," Elena piped in, at full volume and in no uncertain terms. "He handles everything on this end. I can't do his job. Do I look like I could handle the assholes who wander in here off the street? Fuck, no. I'm like, super-nerd. Nobody respects me."

Denali didn't say anything, but he could have kissed the bitch.

"You want your income from Walleye and half-pound sales, he needs to stay alive," Elena said with surprising sharpness. Denali had seen her stand her ground before, but this was different. She was actually arguing, with a logical argument and everything, and with Vicious of all fucking people. Cocaine was a hell of a drug, it made you feel invincible. "I can't work with anyone else."

"You trust him?"

"No, that's a fucking stupid question. I _know_ him. It's entirely different."

This, frighteningly enough, wrested a bitter smirk from Vicious' lips.

"Do you ever really know someone?"

Denali watched, rooted to the spot. Vicious had come in here seething with a rarely seen level of fury just below a calm outside. He didn't know much about it, but he'd heard something had gone down. A shootout in a church. It went badly, Spike Spiegel was dead or missing, and something about a woman...

Elena couldn't have known anything about that, but he'd give the woman anything she asked for if she got him out of this alive. A fucking month-long cruise to Venus, a spa package to those places that did mud baths...

But there was a light in Vicious' eyes that Denali had never seen before, something close to inhuman savagery. The man had never been one to fuck around, but Denali could see it in his eyes. Something was wrong, he was pissed, he found something to mock in what she had said, and Denali sat up a little straighter.

Elena could sense it too, somehow. Her expression, never hopeful, grew intense.

Vicious stood up, and as he went, he pulled a knife out of his pocket. Denali sat frozen, but he got the gist in time to shriek and try to back away.

"What are you— _hey—_ Vicious, come on, man—"

"What are you doing," Elena demanded hotly, standing up. Arms reached for her. Her head was in the clouds, she looked over at the man who grabbed her by the elbow.

" _Sit down_."

"Fuck you, let me go!" Elena twisted her elbow to no effect and shot the blond man a look that could melt steel, but she kept her mouth shut after that.

Denali was screaming now, but two men held him down as Vicious bent over him with the knife.

Elena tried to move but the man who held her elbow held her fast.

"Do you want to join him?" the blond asked. He got a wordless snarl in response.

***...***

* * *

Denali let out a great gout of a shriek that was cut short, reduced to a wet, startled whimper. Elena jumped, seeing a pulse of red blood arc to the left, dripping down the side of the chair and hitting the wall. She exhaled sharply, eyes enormous.

"Shit," Elena said, eloquent and incisive.

Denali slowly stopped twitching, and when he had breathed his last, Vicious straightened up, pleased with himself. His white scarf was spattered with blood, and Elena stared at him, utterly petrified.

Vicious smiled again. Elena stood still, not even shaking, as the taller, younger man approached with blood on his suit and scarf and _hair_.

"You need therapy," she blurted out as she tried to back away, too frightened to think straight. Or was it the drugs? Yeah, probably the drugs. Okay, almost _definitely_ the drugs.

Vicious might have looked vaguely amused. "Who are you?" he asked. "I don't mean your name. Who are you."

"I used to be a graduate student," she whispered, terrified.

"A graduate student?" said the blond man, who still held her elbow. "Shit, that explains a lot. Fucking college kids."

"Used to be." Elena swallowed, and looked at the floor. Her heart was racing so fast it almost made her nauseous, and she staggered once. _It's true, anyway_...

But Vicious wasn't done. "Why are you here?"

"What...?"

"Why are you not in...graduate school." He said it with a sneery little grin that made her blood go cold, but he was not a man given to patience and it was obvious he was fresh out.

"I...I mean, it's not like anyone else was opening up their doors, and I did the prostitute thing, and no thank you..." She flinched, as the man holding her elbow wrenched it painfully, unamused. Denali's hand flopped, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. She could really, possibly die. That could be her in a few seconds if she didn't say something. Something that got him off the high of committing murder. " _Things happened_ , okay! I don't even know what happened!" she cried out. "I just..." _DO. NOT. TELL. THEM. **ANYTHING**_. _ABOUT THE FUCKING SHOW_. It would write her death warrant. Elena was losing her shit, the drugs pulling her mind and coherence apart like taffy. She could feel the helpless tears in her eyes, the fact she was going to have to face the fact that they were absolutely going to push this issue and probably torture her before finally putting her out of her misery because she _couldn't_ give a satisfactory answer.

The truth would sound insane, and probably enrage Vicious (if not, confuse him, if things hadn't happened yet, neither of which sounded promising). Her mind went into overdrive and she was all but shrieking nonsense.

"I don't want to be here! If I ever wanted to I was an idiot! _I just am!_ Here! I don't know why! If I could go back I would, if I knew how I'd have already done it, but I can't! I'm just here, and I do my job and I pay my rent, and that's all! I swear!"

Silence reigned, broken when someone gave a long, low whistle. "She's a loser, but I've got to say she's pretty damn good at her job," remarked the blond thoughtfully, who at least had the grace to let go so Elena could collapse onto the chair, shivering and silent. "She's been making bank in Walleye. Nobody else can touch her numbers, not even the White Crows."

"So _she's_ our in there, huh?" said one of the other men, a short, rangy creature with frizzy black hair and a scar. "I been wondering. I dunno, what do you say, boss? She's a mess, but who gives a fuck if she's crazy if she makes money like that?" He, all of them, looked at Vicious.

Vicious did nothing for a couple of seconds. Then, he put his hands in his pockets.

"You work for me," he said, leering down at her with that icy stare. "If I find out you've been skimming like this little punk bastard, then you can expect the same end. Any questions?"

She sat dazed for a second. "Uh...no?" she said, staring at him with her eyebrows in the vicinity of her hairline, choosing the most to-the-point answer. _I can dig it_. "I mean—no, sir, I don't have any questions?"

One side of his mouth curled up cruelly. "Good. Don't make me come down here again."

Elena could only manage to nod, and then they left.

And that was that.


	3. Chapter 3

Well, here's chapter 3. Still no good things in sight.

More Vicious in the ensuing chapters.

* * *

Hours passed.

Elena sat on the couch, staring at the body, at the blood. Nothingness had settled around her in a strange, oppressive shroud. She had come down off the high long ago, and with it went any lingering delirium or nice feelings. She also had a splitting headache.

It was as if she had run out of gas and her mind had come to a full stop, sitting dead and solid and empty between her ears. She saw, but didn't see. She heard, but didn't hear. Time passed unheeded, and when she was finally jarred back into the present, it wasn't of her own doing.

Someone was pounding at the door. At first, she didn't care to notice. Then, entirely without meaning to, she realized that if someone saw Denali lying there in a partially congealed pool of his own blood they would ask questions. Maybe the cops might show up. She would be an offering to prop up the myth that the cops in this town weren't filthy, because she didn't have anyone to protect her.

Not anymore, anyway.

Fuck that noise.

"HOLD YOUR _FUCKING_ HORSES—YOU'VE WAITED THIS LONG YOU CAN WAIT A LITTLE LONGER!" she barked as she stood up. She was a little surprised when the banging actually stopped.

She looked around for something to cover Denali with, and finally ran into his room for his pillows and blankets. The pillows were there to make it harder for the blood to soak through immediately, and she placed them on top of his chest and face in the shape of a T, then threw the comforter on top.

 _Wait...where is everybody else?_ The apartment was eerily silent. _It's_ never _silent. There's always somebody here_. She dreaded the parts of the apartment she hadn't gone into since returning, the other two bedrooms, the kitchen...the rest of it. Anywhere but the living room and the kitchen. Where were Ken and Maya...

When she answered the door—she put the chain on first, then opened it just a crack and peered out suspiciously—it was someone she had never seen before. A gaunt homeless type with rotten teeth stared back at her. Most of the time Denali's buyers were regulars, but every now and then someone new came around. If it had been someone Elena knew, she might have been less jumpy, more cooperative.

"What do you want," she demanded in a low hiss.

"Looking to score a little bloody mist," the man replied, equally quiet, but point blank. Denali sold both red eye and cocaine, sometimes a little PCP. "I was told this was the place."

Elena looked him up and down and shifted uneasily. "You were told wrong."

"Man that's bullshit! I'm a friend of Cobalt's!"

 _Then where the fuck is Cobalt?_ She hedged her bets: "Come back later. I've got nothing right now."

The man was shocked. "What?"

"I said come back later, asshole!" And she slammed the door shut and bolted both locks.

Not to be dismissed without comment, the man slammed his fist against the door again. "Man, fuck you, bitch! Come out here—I oughta beat that fuckin' mouth off of you! Give you a little something!" He banged on the door one last time.

Elena flinched but her mind was already elsewhere. She took a deep breath and chewed on her lower lip. Was she really here, in a decrepit and decaying high rise apartment, facing the prospect of disposing of one body...with no knowledge of current forensics, or...or anything!

Why, yes—she was.

 _This is my life now_.

One body...so far. Denali was in the living room, but where the fuck were Ken and Maya? The two of them were a package deal, and they were never not here this late...wait, how late was it? The last hour that had pinged on her radar had been just after two in the afternoon.

The light in the apartment coming in through the windows had faded and grown so dim that it was hard to see. Dusk, or damn near dark. It was hard to tell sometimes without looking outside because the night glow could be so bright. Weird...

She made a slow, reluctant search of the apartment, growing more nervous and wrenchingly hopeful that she was wrong the whole time.

She found them in their room, in bed; the down was all over the place, like snow, and so were chunks of them...although that was strikingly less poetic. The bed and the wall had been peppered with gunfire, and some of the down was soaked in blood spatter. _Gunfire? Did no one call the cops?_

Well no, because no-fucking-body called the cops in this part of town. Calling the cops caused problems for the people doing the shooting, and that got you killed.

Elena stood staring at them for several seconds, and then she took a deep breath. She shut her eyes.

"There's no place like home..." Her voice cracked. Sounded weak and tearful to her own ears.

But when she opened them again, she was still here, in a chilly tenement, staring at two people who had been ripped to shreds with automatic gunfire. She ran her hands through her hair, felt the tangible reality of her _being_ , and covered her mouth with her hands, feeling the iciness of her fingers and the warmth of her mouth.

Christ, it still didn't seem real.

Okay. Here she was, and there they were. The cops, apparently, had never been called in over a crap load of gunfire and the sound of someone literally getting his throat sliced open, which seemed strange, but this was that kind of neighborhood. _So, what now?_

Step one was have a cup of coffee, because she wasn't getting any sleep tonight. _Please tell me they didn't break the coffee machine. So help me God, I will find that white-haired prick and shove his sword up his ass if the coffee machine is broken, or die trying_. She didn't even know if that was a joke, but in her own mind, the blood glittered prettily on silver.

She went into the kitchen, where somehow almost everything except the coffee machine was on the floor or in pieces, which effectively meant that she was wading through a lot of wreckage and junk; the sink, always full of filthy dishes and washed piecemeal when a plate or pan was needed, was actually in a relative state of cleanliness, since most of its contents had been scattered. Did Denali put up a fight before they got him to sit down and wait for her to come back? Had he known what was going to happen? It looked that way but she would never know, now. She got a pot of coffee going, and turned around, leaning back against the counter top and surveying the damage. She rapped her nails once against the plastic. Her eyes were the only thing that moved, flicking back and forth as they scanned the area.

A beat of silence.

That silence seemed never-ending.

There was nothing left to break it.

It hit her like a punch in the gut out of the blue, and crescendoed—her heart surged and she slumped to the floor with a sigh that became a moan and slid right into a long, keening, ululating wail, like nothing human. She pressed the heels of her palm into her temples, dug her fingernails into her scalp. When that wasn't enough she hit her head, hard enough to hurt.

 _Denali is dead. Ken and Maya are dead_. _Denali is dead. Ken and Maya are dead. I am alive, I am alone, but why wouldn't he kill me, too, at some point? I have nowhere to go and no way to get there, and now I'm on the hook for selling drugs. He_ will _kill me. Denali is dead. Ken and Maya are dead. Denali is dead. Ken and Maya_ —

Slowly, she lost the energy for hysterics, and when she sat up after that protracted period of haze and fugue, she realized she had ended up in a fetal position on the floor. It was a bit strange, but she was too tired to move anymore.

Now she was done crying, done panicking. Very few tears pricked her eyes; her cheeks were all but dry by now and her eyes, also dry, burned. She listened to the sound of her own shaky breathing and absorbed the sights and sounds around her. All of this was real; the smell of the coffee, and rotten food, of gunpowder and ozone, the reek of blood, urine, and excrement ( _that's right—when you die you void your bowels..._ ). All the wishful thinking in two universes couldn't undo it. The yellowish kitchen light that cast everything in a sickly, jaundiced, chiaroscuro glow. The chill on her bare skin. Up this high in the Martian atmosphere, it got cold. She felt the lumpy smoothness of the cheap linoleum under her palms, the use of space that seemed cramped to Elena's perception. She was learning to like it, but it took some getting used to.

She took a deep breath, and let it out. Her mind had found traction and was gaining.

 _Alright. Let's cut the bullshit and get to work. What have I got to work with?_

Her eyes crawled across the kitchen floor, and she thought, _What do I know about disposing of bodies?_ The answer was not a whole lot...but she had read a lot of books. _And they say you don't learn anything from books_.

She reached for a carving knife that had fallen near where she sat and closed her fingers around the handle. The solidity of it was reassuring.

"Alright," she murmured. "Enough. You've got to do something. On your feet. Get on your fucking feet. Drink some coffee and cry some more if you need to, because you're going to sit the fuck down, and make a list." _I'll need a lot of bleach, and a lot more trash bags. And where is that Dutch oven?_

She stood slowly, still a little weak. She searched out a coffee mug and poured herself a full mug as she fished around for a note pad and a pen to write with. Then she righted the fold up card table that was the only actual table besides the coffee table in the apartment, and one of the chairs, and sat down with her coffee, pen and paper, and knife.

* * *

***...***

* * *

It was the blonde man who had been with Vicious, who was now standing in the hallway and peering in at her. She looked from him, to the knife in her hand, and back up to him with a sullen expression. He, for his part, had his eyes on the knife. She had peeked out through the chain, then he had told her to open the door properly, so she had.

"You might want to think real hard about what you're gonna do with that," he said, grimly.

Elena studied him for several seconds, trying to think up something to say. Nothing came to mind, and after another moment, she realized she didn't give a rat's ass if she couldn't. _Fuck off, I'm busy. Could you not give me 24 hours to work and/or grieve? Thanks_.

She took the knife with her when she turned and walked back into the apartment.

"Where the fuck are you going?"

In the absence of a response, he followed her back to the third bathroom, where she had three bodies' worth of parts boiled and packaged in plastic wrap, neatly stacked into piles. Cooked meat kept better than raw meat, after all.

Elena heard him gasp and gag behind her as she knelt over the bathtub. "What the _fuck?!_ What is all this? What have you done?"

She knelt down with a grunt. Although she didn't look it much in the face, her knees were starting to feel their years and she had had to put a pillow on the bath mat for extra padding, lest they really start to hate her. Behind her, the unknown, familiar-faced man stepped into the bathroom and poked at one of the barrels.

He stumbled back with a girly squeak. "That is a person's hand! Jesus, most people just chuck 'em in the river..."

She turned around and looked up at him, leaning the elbow connected to her knife hand on the edge of the tub and putting the other hand on her hip, then gestured with the knife as she said, " _Most_ people have friends to help them do that if they're physically incapable of carrying a two-hundred-pound man down ten flights of stairs, let alone three freaking people. Y'all shot all of my friends and left me here to sort it out without so much as a fucking _good luck sucker_ , so you tell me: what the fuck else am I supposed to do? I improvised. Okay? Okay. So unless you have something useful to say, shut the fuck up."

He blinked down at her, and glanced around, thoroughly bewildered. _Well, join the fucking club_. Honestly, she hadn't thought she had the nerve.

"Deckard," he said, suddenly, and unaccountably.

She just stared at him. She didn't even raise an eyebrow.

"My name. My name is Deckard. Roy Deckard." He got that out with a questionable mastery of a stammer.

 _Well, la-dee-da. Am I supposed to care?_

"And what is your name," he asked, at last, slowly, and very carefully, as though he were making a real effort to be patient with the crazy woman who had just meticulously bled, chopped up, and boiled three whole human bodies dry, and was now parceling them up like neat little bricks. "I don't remember it. I'm bad with names."

"Elena Reynolds," she replied. She sighed, and it was a physical effort to _force_ herself to speak calmly. It still came out bitchy. "What is it that I can do for you, Roy Deckard?" It was the most polite way she could think of to parse, _what the fuck do you want, you unwelcome dick_.

"The money," he said, studying the scene in distraction. "That uh...you owe us. Denali usually went to the drop site, but the money wasn't there. I guess you don't know where that is, so...here I am. You'll…need to learn."

Ah. The weekly payment. With a swallowed groan that might have successfully transmitted the sentiment that _maybe_ he could have had the decency to say something before she got down on her knees and spared her a little effort, she got up and led him to the living room, after which she went into Denali's room and brought him his money. When she came back, he was poking around the chair Denali had been sitting in when he'd been shot. She walked right up and held it out to him.

"It looks like nothing even happened," Deckard said, seeming almost distressed.

 _That would be the point of cleaning up, fuckwit_.

But she didn't say anything, and her grim countenance seemed to unsettle him. "So...see you next week?"

Elena shrugged. She found it hard to muster the emotional strength to care after all she had been through. She had just spent all night working and cleaning and _hacking through flesh and bones_ and _oh god, the blood and the viscera, she would never forget the **smells** , she could still feel the gooey, sticky heat, Denali ate curry for dinner_ and she was running on nothing but nicotine, caffeine, and arrant spite. She had come this far, she was _not_ throwing in the towel now.

At one point she had even sniffed a little more coke, just to keep herself going. Hey, if speed had been good enough for pilots in WWII, she felt she could be forgiven for this. Her vision was doubling with exhaustion. She recognized the symptoms of an overwrought psyche and the edge of where adrenaline and drugs could take her, but the only goal in her mind was seeing it done at last.

Deckard coughed, made uncomfortable by her persistent silence.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

Elena shrugged again, equally as subdued. What kind of stupid question was that? What was the point in talking about it? More to the point, talking about it with _him?_ He didn't give a fuck; no matter what she said, he would run back to Vicious and report on what had happened here—then, if she were _really_ (un?)lucky, Vicious would figure she was too broken to bother with and have her killed.

Deckard's blond eyebrows crept up his forehead as he gaped at her. "Most people don't have the whole fucking apartment spotless the morning after, well, I mean, _ever again_...like, they were taking bets on whether they'd have to burn it."

Elena just stared back at him, surly, and growing less willing to extend what little patience she had left. She hadn't factored a persistently irritating visitor into her emotional reserves. There were forty trash bags piled up in the bedrooms. Forty. Some of them had pieces of people inside, but most were just full of junk.

"Seriously, this place is cleaner than I've ever seen it. It hasn't even been twenty-four hours. You know, the guys were pretty sure you'd have bailed..."

Why was he talking at her like they were friendly or something? Because they weren't. They _so_ were not friendly.

Her mouth twitched down at the edges and she shot Deckard the most inhospitably malicious look she could muster. _Bailed? And gone where! How? I don't have a passport or legitimate identification! I'd have to leave Mars and_ I can't do that! _I'm stuck here!_

"Leave me alone." It was the only thing she could think of to say, the only thing she wanted to say or to have happen at the moment besides waking up to find out that everything had all been some horrific coma dream. "If you aren't going to do anything useful, you have your money. You can shut the fuck up and leave me alone."

His mouth dropped open, and Elena decided that she was done with this conversation. If he took offense and beat the hell out of her, well then...oh well. It would be nice to feel something. But she had a knife, and first she'd try to carve him up like she had Maya.

"'Till next week," she said calmly, bending her head slightly in a stiff little bow as he watched her leave, retreating back to the bathroom.


End file.
